Varicella zoster virus encodes several proteins that regulate the growth cycle and the goal of the research is to investigate the domains that influence their functional integrity. The genome of it and several other herpesviruses with better understanding regulatory proteins have been sequenced, allowing comparisons to be made. The software and databases available at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will enable sequence comparisons to be made to identify functional, conserved and diverse regions, and these will be used to correlate function to the structure of these proteins and their interaction with nucleic acids.